<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>A Cottage by the Sea by Silex</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25406095">A Cottage by the Sea</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex'>Silex</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Has Anyone Heard of the Left/Right Game? - NeonTempo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Based on a Creepypasta, Gen, Lovecraftian Horror, Missing Scene, Siblings, Small Towns, Travel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 03:20:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,446</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25406095</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The town of Wintery Bay is such a lovely place, quiet and peaceful, if a bit strange. But it's a small town and it's a right for a small town to be odd. Besides, Linda is happy there and that's all that's important. Just her and her cottage by the sea and the little town. That's all she needs.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Martin &amp; Linda</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Cottage by the Sea</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowersforgraves/gifts">flowersforgraves</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was such a lovely place, Wintery Bay, especially in the mornings. When Linda got up early enough, before the sun, she could stand at the back door of her little cottage and watch the stars fade on the horizon as the fog rolled in. The sky would grow murky with the coming day, the black diluting to a steely gray and the stars would wink out one by one, devoured by the swirling mist rising up from the heaving gray sea.</p><p>It was funny, in all of her getting up early, she’d never once actually seen the sun rise, coloring the dawn sky. The fog was always there just ahead of it, leeching the colors from the sky, turning it to a faded watercolor, washed out and milky, or the soft creams and pinks of the inside of a shell.</p><p>There were plenty of shells on the little pebbled beach, washed up by the night tide. There was always something new to find on the beach, shells and other, stranger, things. To get there was just a short walk down a sandy path behind the cottage. Tufts of dune grass on either side rustled softly in the wind and from the flitting passage of unseen, shadowy things.</p><p>Broken reedy cries pierced the gloom as the little birds took wing, startled from their nests in the grass. Ragged, misty shadows most easily seen out of the corner of her eye, fading into the swirling fog whenever she turned to look. She’d never seen them clearly through the uncertain gray, but they had to be birds.</p><p>They chirped and trilled mournfully and they had wings, the long sticklike legs of wading birds, even if when they landed they broke into a rolling trot on four legs.</p><p>Little birds like scraps of charred paper, weaving in and out of the tall arcing shapes rising out of the water, the ribs of some mammoth sea creature, washed up long before the town had been dreamed into being.</p><p>They’d frightened her when she’d seen them for the first time, their shapes too sharp, too defined in the gauzy haze that enveloped the rest of the world. She was used to them now though, landmarks constant enough to navigate by so that she never feared getting lost. As long as she walked back to the ribs and then straight up the beach from them she could always find her way home to her cottage.</p><p>No matter how far she wandered she could make it back home, the ribs guiding her there.</p><p>It was a peaceful thought, being able to say that she lived up the beach from the ribs in the cottage with the rose garden.</p><p>She didn’t mind being known for that by the locals. They’d been suspicious at first, but they’d quickly warmed up to her. They were small town characters, right out of a story book, each and every one of them.</p><p>There was Old Mr. Bisset, as he was called by everyone as though it was his proper name, even if he couldn’t have been much older than her, and his little shop full of woodcarvings. Whimsical little creatures that almost seemed to move when you looked away with their bright, beady eyes, cruelly hooked beaks and abundance of grasping talons. Birds he called them, though she was sure he was joking. Young Bisset, his son, did say that his father had a sense of humor, even if it was a peculiar one.</p><p>Mrs. Morris and her little shop on the wharf where she sold sundresses and shells, pretty stones and little things that were washed up by the tide was a delight. The two of them often met, walking down the beach, seeing what there was to see. They’d had many a long and intimate conversation, even if the details always seemed to escape her immediately afterwards.</p><p>It was quite possible for the two of them to spend the whole morning talking as they walked, until the sun burned away the last of the fog and the ribs shone so starkly against the sea that it hurt her eyes to look at them for too long.</p><p>Linda would return home, eyes and throat hurting until she got herself a glass of water. The water from the tap always tasted strangely alkaline, no matter how long she let it run. Old pipes in an old house, just another small town oddity that she’d needed to get used to, one of many that became easier to ignore with each passing day.</p><p>Like the noises that came from the dark stand of cedar trees on the peninsula in the distance. She’d been told that the children sometimes went there and ran wild, which was a strange thing.</p><p>There was nothing there of interest to explain all the sounds, deep rumblings like distant thunder that echoed in her chest and made her ears pop and shrill whistles like a firework rising up into the air.</p><p>That might have been what they were doing there, sending up fireworks out over the sea where they’d fall harmlessly into the water, not that there was any danger of the perpetually sodden dune grass catching fire.</p><p>The thing was, even when she heard those noises, she never saw any lights except for the bright blue and green phosphorescence rippling across the waves. Rarely, so very rarely that she only thought about it on the occasions it happened, those lights would rise above the water and arc along its surface like lightning across the clouds. She’d asked her neighbors about them and was told they were best ignored as long as they stayed over the water.</p><p>It was said so plainly, so matter-of-factly that she’d accepted it at face value despite the note of warning to it.</p><p>Someday she would gather the courage to ask what she should do if those spidery, creeping lights began to move up the path to her cottage, but she hadn’t yet.</p><p>Not even when she found the remains of what might have been one of the birds, burnt to a black husk, papery flesh stretched across little twigs of bone.</p><p>Except it couldn’t have been a bird. It didn’t have legs or wings or anything recognizable, just an angular wedge shape of a body and a long, trailing tail with spines like teeth all down it.</p><p>It had frightened her a little, maybe more, but only later that night when she was watching the lights and thinking about how, despite all of the talk of them and the mischief they supposedly got into, she’d never seen any children in town.</p><p>Not a single one.</p><p>Not even in the two ice cream parlors, right across from each other and always suspiciously empty. The one of them reminded her of when she was a little girl, and she’d even gone in there once. The woman behind the counter had been nice enough, though there was a hungry look in her eyes, as though she’d imagined more for her life than serving ice cream in a sleepy little town. Her politeness was sharp, forced, and her smile too wide.</p><p>The ice cream was good though, even if she never went back because of the way the woman had watched her after she left, the too-wide smile gone, pressed into a hard, thin line, her eyes dark and serious.</p><p>If Linda ever again wanted ice cream that badly there was always the other parlor, but there was a reason she hadn’t chosen that one, with its glass front and small lights hanging on wires, that turned the counter into a vulnerable little island on the checkered floor.</p><p>There was a reason, even if she didn’t understand it herself.</p><p>In the town of Wintery Bay everyone and everything had reasons.</p><p>Like how you never asked the young couple fishing at the end of the wharf what they’d caught. As far as she knew the couple were always there, rain or shine, and the woman was eager to open up their little cooler and pull out their most recent catch. Usually it was a fish of a kind that Linda had never seen before with glassy, misaligned eyes staring into infinity, but there were times it was something else.</p><p>Things that a person would never keep if they pulled it out of the water.</p><p>No matter what she showed off, the young woman would smile and say that they’d be eating well that night and invite Linda to join them, while her husband, or maybe brother – the two of them looked far too alike, as though an artist had filled in the same outline with different details for the two of them, would nod eagerly.</p><p>Wintery Bay was odd, as all small towns were if they were old enough for it. Oddness was a rite of passage for a town, proving that it was a place, a real place that had come into its own, but it was a lovely place.</p><p>A peaceful and quiet place, as if the washed out sky and fog, always there, even if it had been pushed back to the much-too-close horizon, muffled all sound.</p><p>The waves, even in the aftermath of a storm, never roared, they always hissed softly against the shore, tossing up shells and things to rest amid the rocks.</p><p>Once when walking along the tideline she found a ring, a wedding ring, she knew the moment she picked it up. Without hesitation she threw it back to the sea because the lost ring, such an important thing that would never be found, made her deeply, profoundly sad. Not for herself or for Martin, but for the unknown person who’d lost it. A dear, precious thing, lost, never to be found, even if it was too easy to imagine that the owner had been wearing it when it ended up in the water, followed by their lover.</p><p>They’d stood on a bridge on a summer’s night, heat lightning filling the dry clouds, the air electric as they made a final promise, that they’d find a better place, a place free of the sorrow of what was to come. The ring at least had done that, the promise it represented making it all the way to Wintery Bay.</p><p>After that she’d sunk into a deep melancholia for the rest of her walk. Listening to the muscle shells click and pop amid the rocks and grass as the water receded had been unbearable, the sound somehow mournful, as though they’d been betrayed by the falling tide. As though it had gone on and left them behind.</p><p>It would return, but did they know?</p><p>What did a shell know in life?</p><p>Plenty in death, she was sure of that after holding the crooked spiral of a whelk to her ear and hearing not the roar of waves or the hiss of blood in her ears magnified by the shell, but secrets seen from the muddy seabed.</p><p>When she turned around the sight of the ribs, tall and solid against the indistinct world hadn’t been comforting, instead she’d been filled with dread.</p><p>If such a creature had died, then it had lived, dragged itself up to the shallows and waited.</p><p>The few ribs that remained gave no hint of what direction it had been facing, longingly back to the sea, or hungrily to the land, like the woman in the ice cream parlor.</p><p>Its absent skull would have easily been the size of a small cottage on the shore, plenty of room for its sluggish, dying thoughts to wander, like a lonely woman in an empty house.</p><p>Waiting, yearning.</p><p>If one such creature had lived, there must have been others for such a creature did not come from nothing.</p><p>Maybe they still lived, eel-like bodies undulating in the fathomless depths, hidden by gray fog and water so deep it was black as the night sky, their great forms scattering fish and little glowing things, the living stars in the endless night of the abyss.</p><p>A careless sweep of the tail would sweep them all aside, just like how occasionally the stars in the night sky would flicker and vanish too soon, sometimes returning the next day, sometimes ending up hung in some new position, and sometimes simply gone.</p><p>If she went out onto the water on a boat, like the ones she sometimes saw through the fog, she was sure that one of those creatures, long as a road, would be waiting there, just below the surface, to rise up and swallow her whole, carrying her away to some unknowable destination.</p><p>It was a mercy, she knew, that they’d been in the water so long that they’d forgotten that they had legs.</p><p>Because if they remembered…</p><p>They didn’t though, so even if she was afraid, she was safe in her cottage, on the streets of the town and walking along the beach, glancing nervously over her shoulder to make sure the ribs were still where they were supposed to be.</p><p>As safe as a person could be in an empty home that stubbornly refused to accumulate the clutter of a lived in place.</p><p>The trinkets in the shell store were of no interest to her and the carving that Young Bisset had given her crouched alone on its shelf, silent and judging, but generous enough to remain still.</p><p>There was sometimes the thought that, even though it was wood, she should get a cage for the little bird with all its teeth and eyes. The way it crouched, wings half spread in anticipation of flight, made her think it was a perfect replica of the seabirds that she’d never managed to see.</p><p>Her bookshelves that remained empty despite the lovely little used bookstore in town. Down a side alley way up, and then down a set of stairs, was a quaint little shop. Except quaint wasn’t the right word given the kinds of books they sold. They all looked right at first glance, shelves of old cookbooks, tables displaying travel books full of glossy pictures of beautiful and exotic places, battered encyclopedias and dictionaries on one wall, and slim, dog-eared paperbacks, some of them wrinkled and swollen as though dragged from the tide and dried out on another, but when Linda took the time to browse what was offered there was something off about them.</p><p>The charming set of encyclopedias with their green and gold leather spines were old and lovely for it, but the information in them was subtly wrong in ways that she couldn’t put her finger on, names and dates didn’t line up the way she remembered from her history lessons back in school, though that could have been the fault of her memory rather than the books.</p><p>The owner, a slender young man with oddly familiar eyes, was always helpful, stepping away from distractedly dusting the glass display case of scrimshaw and wiping up the brackish smelling water that sometimes pooled beneath it, to show her items that might interest her.</p><p>Usually a cookbook where all the recipes, even the familiar ones, called for ingredients that she’d never heard of, or a collection of overly impressionistic postcards of places she’d neither been to nor wanted to see. Once he took one of the pieces of scrimshaw out for her to hold. Cold and slick, the intricately carved tooth showed a whale breeching over a capsized rowboat, a badly listing ship in the background.</p><p>Holding it she could smell the salt, hear the cries of the seabirds, perfectly normal gulls, circling overhead, little black jags against a bone white sky, over the tumultuous sea of ink and ivory.</p><p>She’d handed it back to him and he’d smiled, letting her know that he saw it as well.</p><p>The scrimshaw would be too expensive for her to buy, even if she’d wanted it, the price something that she couldn’t pay, though that didn’t stop the young man from offering that or another carving to her each time she visited after that.</p><p>The shelves in her little cottage remained resolutely empty aside from the carved bird and a few interesting shells that she’d found on the beach.</p><p>It was lonely sometimes, but she was used to being alone, there was nothing new about it, nothing strange.</p><p>Besides, someday she was sure that she wouldn’t be alone, that Martin would join her and again be her constant companion. Perhaps the others as well, growing tired of the road and its mysteries, they would turn back and eventually reach Wintery bay. Then they could walk along the beach together, finding an end to all mystery beneath the shadows of the ribs, picking up bits of memory caught amid the black and brittle seaweed washed up by storms.</p><p>Until then she would wait in Wintery Bay.</p><p>It wasn’t such a bad place to wait and if she closed her eyes and listened hard enough she could almost hear her brother at the door.</p><p>“Linda.”</p><p>She would smile, open the door and ignore how the frame of it wavered, as though the ribs were the only things allowed the distinction of sharp lines.</p><p>“Linda,” more urgently this time, interrupting her thoughts, pulling her attention from the carved wooden bird on the shelf and its disappointed gaze.</p><p>The windows of the cottage were crooked in their frames, the glass bowed and distorted, filled with bubbles and flowing ripples, as though it wasn’t solid, but rather a thick liquid, flowing too slow for the eye to see.</p><p>She couldn’t see Martin, but he was there through the fog outside, hurrying up a sidewalk that crumbled like ash, blowing away into the ceaseless wind coming in from the water.</p><p>He was solid and real, a dark shape against the watercolor world around him.</p><p>Roses and lavender in her front garden melted into abstract shapes as he knocked on the door.</p><p>It swung silently open, unlocked. In Wintery Bay there was no need for locks.</p><p>Anything a thief there would want couldn’t be protected by something so mundane and solid.</p><p>Her brother stood in the doorframe, looking down at her, little more than a silhouette against the light behind him.</p><p>“Linda, are you alright?”</p><p>She was fine, everything was fine. In Wintery Bay she was safe as long as she was careful and never asked the wrong questions.</p><p>Her brother’s hand was on her shoulder, warm and real against the white fog that had invaded everything, turning the whole world into decaying outlines, shapes that scattered into nothing when she reached out for them.</p><p>“I’m fine Martin,” she said, her own voice small and distant in her ears, as though it was part of the fading world around her.</p><p>Her eyes watered as she opened them, revealing not the lovely, misty little cottage that the hitchhiker had promised her, but the harsh dawn light illuminating the road.</p><p>She blinked, trying to clear sleep from her eyes, shrugging her shoulders to try and work out the tension in them that came from falling asleep sitting in the car.</p><p>They weren’t in Wintery Bay, not yet. It was still a long way off, as far as dreams, but when they got there everything would be fine.</p><p>“You sounded like you were having a nightmare,” he said, his voice hushed, even though it was just the two of them in the car, the others gathered in the distance for an unnecessary breakfast.</p><p>“I wasn’t,” she said, not sure why she sounded so defensive as she tried to remember what she’d dreamed. It was fading though, all drifting away into salt scented nothingness. There had been a cottage with a bright garden full of flowers, waiting for her, smiling people in a sunny little town beside a shimmering blue sea. Yes, she was sure that was what she’d dreamed of. The people were all so happy, laughing children picking through the rocks on the tideline, searching for shells, building castles in the sand.</p><p>“I wasn’t,” she repeated, disappointed when Martin didn’t ask what she’d been dreaming of because she wanted to tell him about it before it all faded from her head. It had been such a lovely dream, such a lovely place, “I dreamt of –”</p><p>“Wintery Bay,” he finished for her, eyes full of worry that she couldn’t understand.</p><p>Why did it upset him so much that she wanted to go back there, to see the cottage the hitchhiker had told them about?</p><p>“It’s a lovely place,” she sighed wistfully, “I’ll be so happy there.”</p><p>Her brother said nothing, staring out into the distance, ahead to where Wintery Bay waited for them.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>